I mentioned the move by the La Mesa/Spring Valley school district to delay the President’s speech to their students. I said then, and I believe more today, that we need to think about how treat each other in political discourse. On occasion, there can be a right and a wrong besides a right and a left.

Well, the Voice of San Diego (a great publication by the way) followed up with two of the school board members who voted to delay the speech.  They both seem to regret the decision.

I just spoke to [school board member] Halgren. She explained that she hadn’t understood that the group experience — not the exact content of the speech itself — was part of what made the event important. Two teachers who talked with her about it convinced her that it should have been a collective experience. “There are certain things that you do in life that bring us together as a community and as a nation,” she said.

I also got an e-mail from another board member, Bob Duff. He wrote:  

After seeing the President’s speech, I now believe the message should have been viewed live and I regret I was responsible for the delay. All should had the opportunity to have seen it live. For this I truly apologize.

Too bad you don’t normally get do-overs for your moments of partisan inanity. The real losers here were the students of the district.

With all the furor over President Obama’s speech to the nation’s schoolchildren gradually dying down around the country, it’s still raging in La Mesa:

Trustees of the La Mesa-Spring Valley School District met in a special session on Labor Day and voted to prohibit their schools from showing President Barack Obama’s speech Tuesday to district students.

The address, which the president delivered at Wakefield High School in Washington, D.C., was televised at schools across the country. (SD U-T 9/9/9)

If you are interested in their litany of excuses, you can read the whole article. My favorites were, “it will take too long for the students to walk to the cafeteria” and “20 minutes was too long.” Instead of simply allowing the students of the district to watch the speech along with the rest of the nation, the district apparently plans to “lesson plan” around it…ie, shelve it for a while until people forget about it.  

Yet, this is part of something bigger. It says something quite disturbing about where the Right is taking the nation.  Included in that is the right-wing media. For example, peep this article at the OC Register. Not only does the Register write an article about a completely unscientific “poll” but it tries to infer that somehow 26% of OC residents would support a white supremacist party. Now, I realize that there are some crazy people in this state, but I can’t believe the numbers are really that high.

I suppose there was always some level of guttural discourse about politics, it’s basic to the game. However, if we are to really address the problems of the 21st Century, we have to think about the issues, and talk about them, like adults. Enough with the scare tactics and race baiting already.

To my fellow Californians who are thinking of taking a sign with a Hitler mustache on Obama, some unsolicited advice. Take a deep breath. Think about whether you really want to compare your president to a man who killed millions of people for no reason other than he didn’t like them.  Godwin’s Law needn’t always be true.